The field of communications has become increasingly important in today's society. One area of importance associated with network communications relates to load balancing. As traffic and subscriber base of end users increases, so too does the importance of efficient management of workload in networks. Load balancing mechanisms distribute workload across multiple network links, computers, and other resources to achieve desired resource utilization and throughput while avoiding overload and long response times. In particular, load balancing mechanisms may be implemented in TRansparent Interconnect of Lots of Links (TRILL) networks. TRILL applies network layer routing protocols to the link layer and uses that information to support Layer 2 multi-pathing, thus enabling multi-hop Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), reducing latency and improving overall network bandwidth utilization, among other features.